***1/2 (out of ****)
Starring Gary Oldman, Winona Ryder, Anthony Hopkins, Keanu Reeves, Richard E. Grant, Cary Elwes, Sadie Frost, Bill Campbell, Tom Waits, and Monica Bellucci
Directed by Francis Ford Coppola & written by James V. Hart, from the novel by Bram Stoker, with cinematography by Michael Ballhaus, set design by Thomas Sanders, and costume design by Eiko Ishioka
1992
R 130 minutes
“Bram Stoker’s Dracula” is a careening, barely-in-control, nightmarish, wild-eyed, salivating experience. As directed by the great Francis Ford Coppola (The “Godfather” trilogy, “Apocalypse Now,” “The Conversation”), it’s not terribly interested in daytime plot development. We don’t know why Dracula is doing things and we don’t know how his powers work. It just makes sense in the inevitable way a nightmare does. Fans of my site will know I’m a sucker for movies that convey the unconscious more than the conscious.
But that is the great divide within vampire lore, isn’t it? There are those who want to know all the exact details of how everything works, like they’re about to play The Vampyre in a game of “Dungeons & Dragons” (this category would include “Interview with a Vampire,” “Underworld,” and the “Blade” flicks). And then there are those who are content to let the vampire be otherworldly, to have its powers be vague and mysterious, like the two “Nosferatu” films and Guy Maddin’s “Dracula: Pages From a Virgin’s Diary.” For the latter group, “Bram Stoker’s Dracula” is their great, lavish behemoth.
It’s tempting to call Coppola’s “Dracula” “pure cinema.” It is all tricks and visual contrivances. It’s about eyes turning into the moon, about loud music, about high speed sunsets, about bleeding crucifixes, about men with torches in graveyards, about white-powdered boobs flopping out of harem bodices, about cutting directly from a severed head to a pot roast. Maybe in the end this “Dracula” is a brainless action movie for people with bigger brains, who get a kick out of images and ideas splashed across the screen in vivid colors that hearken back to the Vincent Price horror films of days gone by. To cops and car crashes this audience prefers supernatural beasts, fine gardens, ominous Gothic mansions, limitless rooms packed with lighted candles, crumbling castles, carriage rides over dangling precipices, and so on.
What Coppola has done is similar to what Quentin Tarantino later does with “Kill Bill,” except with a different genre: while Tarantino resurrected the goofball kung-fu movies of the 1970s, Coppola has mined the 1960s Hammer Film and given it a bigger budget, a few extra layers of glossy excess, and some self-referential, self-parodying winks. Coppola’s grasp of the controls is, admittedly, a little more shaky than Tarantino’s. But nobody’s perfect.
“Bram Stoker’s Dracula” throws together all the concepts and images associated with vampirism—both in and out of Stoker’s novel and without concern for anachronism—puts them in a great big blender, and spits them out almost too fast for us to absorb them. We get Dracula before he is Dracula, as an especially brutal medieval crusader named Vlad the Impaler (Gary Oldman) who, ticked off by the Almighty’s sense of irony, vows revenge against the Lord and wills himself into becoming immortal. We get a Victorian real estate agent (Keanu Reeves) having a really creepy time at Dracula’s castle, being teased by undead bimbos and watching his decrepit host scale sheer walls on all fours.
We get the prim and proper English gentlemen (Richard E. Grant and Cary Elwes), all smug, high-collared, and stupidly indignant, trying to contain the budding sexuality of the ladies (Winona Ryder and Sadie Frost) Dracula hopes to seduce. We get the tobacco-chewing, gun-slinging Texan (Bill Campbell), who adds a Bowie knife to the movie’s many phallic symbols. And we get two great madmen, one the vampire hunter Van Helsing (Anthony Hopkins, with a deliciously crazy accent), the other Dracula’s bug-eating servant Renfield (singer Tom Waits).
Most of the actors get into the swing of things. Oldman is thoroughly creepy as the various incarnations of Dracula, not counting the wolf, rats, and green mist created by the special effects team. As the old man Dracula he is suggestively dirty and effeminate; keep your eyes open for a great scene in which he delicately licks blood off a razor. As the young man he is cool, sensitive, and long-haired, looking more like a glam rocker in his top hat and sunglasses, and as the monster he is both fearsome and desperate. Hopkins is just terrific, one moment shouting, the next hurling severed zombie heads off a cliff, the next dry-humping his companions to demonstrate what it means to be a bride of Satan.
As the Victorian bimbo in the throes of Dracula’s telepathic passion, Sadie Frost is constantly ripping open her top and writhing lasciviously, while the stuffed-shirts do all they can without damaging their posture and stiff-upper lips. I’m not sure if any of them gets to say “Good Lord!” in that righteously indignant English way, but they always look like they’re about to. Special mention should be made of art directors Michael Ballhaus and Eiko Ishioka, who racked up multiple Oscars and BAFTA awards for “Dracula.” They won not just for making everything look so fantastic, so much like Scorsese’s “Age of Innocence” except with a vampire in it, but for making it able to withstand all the scenery-chewing.
Sometimes we think of movies only in terms of the direct descendents of novels and plays. We tend to forget that ballet, Kabuki, opera, painting, and architecture are part of cinema’s heritage, and that these things do not always affect us in terms of “story, “character,” and “message.” Sometimes, like “Bram Stoker’s Dracula,” it’s good enough to just see a series of sensationally suggestive images, a series of free associations beginning with the word “vampire,” plowed together by a dizzy, dreaming narrative. The entire experience can be likened to a drunken roller coaster ride through the Vatican.
Finished November 4th, 2003
Copyright © 2003 Friday & Saturday Night
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